Open tools are not enough: Europe needs a state

The question: does Europe have its own design culture, between American big tech and China’s state-led model? Should it build its own tools, or keep to critical reflection and imagination?

I attended the National Design Debate 2026, “Shaping Europe”, on Friday 23 October at the Evoluon in Eindhoven. It was organised by Waag Futurelab and Next Nature as part of Dutch Design Week.

Here is my summary of, and some comments on, the closing debate between artist and philosopher Koert van Mensvoort and Marleen Stikker, co-founder and director of Waag Futurelab. TL;DR: there was much anguish and anger at where Europe finds itself.

The moderator opened by asking what conditions are needed to reach humane technology.

Van Mensvoort: imagine a future worth living in. Looking at today’s news, it’s easy to imagine disaster. Imagining a future you would want, would wish on others and can achieve is hard. He rejects the term “polycrisis”. The real crisis is a crisis of connection between people.

Some background helps here. Van Mensvoort’s philosophy is “next nature”: the technology we have made has become so complex that it behaves like nature. No one controls it, so we have to learn to live with it. He is broadly hopeful about technology.

Stikker said straight off the bat that we have a problem and that our analysis of this moment must go deeper. Her past positions echo some of mine. Technology is not neutral. It carries the values and power of whoever builds and owns it, so the remedy is political: public values, digital rights, open technology.

She also had some propositions. The cultural and design sectors should make what they believe in, not only what clients ask for. AI is driven by stock-market mechanisms, not by the technology.

Question the assumptions in the Draghi and Wennink (former head of ASML) reports before public money goes into AI without public control. Europe is angry enough to act alone. She tied this to the “open social” launch that evening of oso.social, built with Eurosky. That faith in open protocols is where I part ways with her, and I come back to it below.

Van Mensvoort went big: humanism and planetary governance. Europe’s core is humanism, as in Erasmus. Ask of every gadget whether it strengthens your humanity or outsources it.

He polled the audience: nearly everyone had used AI that month, few a European AI, fewer still one “that strengthens their humanity”. The next step for him is planetary governance. Humans may need AI to deal with climate change, biodiversity loss and urbanisation.

Stikker shot back: making the climate crisis worse and faster with AI is nihilistic. The idea that AI will save us, or that human intelligence is not enough, is dangerous. For that she got applause. Van Mensvoort said he had been misunderstood. He had said we may need AI, not that it will save us or is a new god. Humans keep finding a way because we are inventive.

For Stikker, nearly all of capitalism rests on extracting value. Regenerative value lasts longer but does not show up in GDP, the Dutch planning bureau’s models or the EU reports. She wants an economy built on commons. As long as only extractive models can justify investment, each step takes us further down the wrong path.

Van Mensvoort noted the common saying that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. He picked up an earlier panellist, Erwin Blom, on being able to switch between American, European and Chinese models, and noted the irony that China releases open models.

When I heard Blom, I imagined Chinese officials of the Self-Strengthening Movement in the 1890s, gathered over tea: in awe of European steamships, railways and guns, and afraid of what they would do to their society. Their answer was to build the machines but keep the old state and its values. Within a few years their country had fallen to the second rank.

Stikker closed by saying Europe already knows the way: an AI model it controls. GPT-NL needs far more than its roughly 12 million euros, and Mistral, she said, sits too close to Microsoft. (ASML, based in neighbouring Veldhoven, has put more than €1.3bn into the French Mistral. For context, Anthropic is thought to have received $125 billion in funding so far.)

Treat AI as digital public infrastructure, with Linux, the Web, Nextcloud and Proton as precedents, Stikker said. Build a coalition of climate, biodiversity, energy and housing cooperatives and the creative industry, to take a new story to Europe.

Where I stand

Stikker’s position is common among people in Europe who work in digital culture and politics: a belief in open technologies, and a preference for small tools, tools you can use yourself.

The tradition goes back a long way, and much of it is American: Lewis Mumford’s warnings against the “megamachine”, Ivan Illich’s “tools for conviviality”, and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, whose motto “access to tools” served the back-to-the-land communes of the 1960s and then early Silicon Valley. Do it yourself, and against big machine capitalism.

The historian Fred Turner draws a useful line through that history. The US New Left took on power by organising and protesting. The “New Communalists” around Brand tried to go around it, with tools and alternative communities instead of politics. Stikker’s politics, I suspect, are the New Left’s, but her tools are the New Communalists’ small, open ones.

But Brand himself changed his mind. He later said the Catalog had been “very libertarian” and that the government apparatus is “quite wonderful, and quite crucial”.

My view is closer to Marx’s. Technology and capital are among the most powerful engines we have. They have transformed our world and will probably keep doing so. I take inspiration from Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto: we can’t escape technology; it has become what I call a non-optional system. So we have to take part and do politics. Here I agree with Stikker. We should shape technology to our ends.

Where I differ is on how. The shaping is a collective process, and it should use the collective technologies we already have. Language is one. The state is another, and a very important one. Open tools alone can’t do the job: a protocol can be open while the costly servers and the moderation that run it at scale still end up in a few hands. Organised well, a state can bring capital to bear to build European technologies that can stand next to those of China and America.

But Europe is not a state. It is an association of states pulling in opposite directions, each fighting to keep as much power as it can, even if the result is smaller, less effective and more expensive. Europe has no single capital market, and more than anything else this holds back its tech sector and its growth. The Netherlands, along with Germany, has been the main obstacle to a capital markets union. To his credit, Wennink went further than even Draghi: he called for one, and for going ahead with a coalition of the willing if the EU will not move.

If that were fixed, Europe would be a formidable force. Such a state must be under democratic control, so that its technologies reflect the humanist values Europeans want.

In the end I felt closer to Van Mensvoort than I expected. Europe can do this, if it changes its attitude.